Internet Explorer 9 still has that new browser smell, but Microsoft is already looking ahead to its replacement. Microsoft revealed Internet Explorer 10 at the MIX11 conference today. Don’t leap out of your seat in outrage because it’ll take some time before IE 10 is released as a full product. However, you can download the Internet Explorer 10 Preview at this very moment.

IE 10 will continue to build upon Microsoft’s commitment to HTML5. The IE 10 preview will provide support for things such as CSS3 Gradients and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout. The typical user could care less about this technical stuff. They want to know about changes to things they can relate to like Twitter and graphics.

So how can IE 10 alter the Twitter experience? Microsoft showed a demo of this on video.

Due to CSS3 multi-column layout support in IE 10, you can add tweets to Tweet Flow across five columns. The tweets continue to flow in real-time. When Microsoft demoed Tweet Flow in Firefox, the tweet boxes were cut off and uneven across three columns.

Microsoft also showed a demo of 500 fish swimming in a fish bowl with water in high definition. Different effects were added to the bowl and HTML5 provided the audio. When this was tried in Chrome 11, the fish were moving at a much lower framerate.

Give it a try if you’re interested. Just know that the IE 10 preview won’t install on anything lower than Windows 7.